“Over the long term, you are more likely to fool yourself than others.”— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, amazon.com
“The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence, but of the coherence of the story that the mind has managed to construct.”— Daniel Kahneman, brainpickings.org
“We know that in his work Proust did not describe a life as it actually was, but a life as it was remembered by the one who had lived it. And yet even this statement is imprecise and far too crude. For the important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his m…”— Walter Benjamin, amazon.com
“The meaning of what actually happens and appears while it is happening is revealed when it has disappeared.”— Hannah Arendt, amazon.com
“We think that at every moment we are masters of our actions; but if we look back on the course of our lives and in particular bear in mind our unfortunate steps together with their consequences, we often do not understand how we could do this or omit to do that, so that it looks as if a stranger pow…”— Arthur Schopenhauer, amazon.com
“I could never be as honest about myself in a piece of nonfiction as I could in any of my novels and so I gave up.”— Bret Easton Ellis, Bret Easton Ellis, amazon.com
“Narratives in which one thing follows from the previous thing are usually imaginary.”— Sarah Manguso, amazon.com
“The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will…”— Jonathan Gottschall, amazon.com